President Donald Trump’s assertion that “both sides” were to blame for the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia is widely viewed as a hallmark moment in the president’s longstanding record of racist behavior—a turning point so defining that it attracted what has become an exceedingly rare response in American politics: bipartisan condemnation. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted about the “squad.” “I do believe that he messed up in his comments on Tuesday when it sounded like a moral equivocation or at the very least moral ambiguity when we need extreme moral clarity,” Paul Ryan, then the Republican House Speaker, confessed at the time.